Delegates of nine European photon science laboratories met on 9-11.04.2008 in Hamburg to establish a new pan-European Research Infrastructure of free electron laser (FEL) light sources.

The new facility called IRVUX-FEL is included in the European Roadmap for Research Infrastructures 2006 developed by the European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures (ESFRI - http://cordis.europa.eu/esfri/). In a Preparatory Phase Project funded by the 7th Framework Programme of the EC, the laboratories are now combining their forces to build and operate IRUVX-FEL as a distributed European facility.

It will include FLASH at DESY, Hamburg, Germany, which has been in operation since 2005, FERMI at Elettra, Trieste, Italy, which is currently under construction, and several other FEL sources which are in the planning phase, among them POLFEL in Swierk, Poland, and projects in France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.

IRUVX-FEL will offer a suite of complementary FEL light sources and instrumentation that is unsurpassed in the world. The new sources combine the wide and continuously tunable wavelength range of synchrotron radiation – from infrared (IR) through ultraviolet (UV) to X-rays - with ultra-short pulses and coherence of lasers, but at much higher peak and average power, offering completely new research opportunities in different areas of science for a large, multi-disciplinary research community.

It will be possible, for example, to image nano-objects at femtosecond shutter speed and to explore the three-dimensional atomic dynamics of materials at the (femtosecond) timescale of atomic motion.

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Dr. Francisco Garcia-Moreno and his team have designed a turntable that rotates ultra-stably about its axis at a constant rotational speed. This really depends...